An effective cinematic antidote to Valium: from the first ominous musical strains to the final smoke-clearing, it exercises an unslackening tug on the viewer. The upper-crust British critics responsible for enshrining this classically styled Hollywood B-picture have been quick to draw parallels to Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, but Assault on Precinct 13 recalls nothing so much as an urban Night of the Living Dead. In the murkily illuminated opening scene, a police riot squad ambushes a ghetto youth gang, and your mind, trained by daily doses of the six o'clock news, turns automatically to meditate on racial strife in urban society. But director-writer John Carpenter quickly counters your expectations by shuffling the deck with enough blacks and whites on both sides of the battleline to lead your thoughts away from any sociological or psychological analysis of the conflict. He traffics instead in a purely abstract violence that obeys a jungle or nightmare logic and asks no other rationale; and in the movie's prevailing semi-darkness he crafts some classic action scenes: the hailstorm pelting of the police station by eerily inaudible gunshots, and the madly accelerating siege on the station windows by countless kamikaze terrorists. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
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